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Publications

The Asia-Pacific Development Journal (APDJ) is published twice a year by the Macroeconomic Policy and Development Division of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

The primary objective of the APDJ is to provide a platform for the exchange of knowledge, experience, ideas, information and data on all aspects of economic and social development issues and concerns facing the region and to stimulate policy debate and assist in the formulation of policy.

This document reviews progress made in the Asian and Pacific region in line with international commitments, with particular attention to the Universal Access targets developed for low and concentrated epidemic countries in Asia and the Pacific through regional and civil society consultations in 2006. Based on these findings, the paper also reviews the main challenges and identifies ways forward in scaling up the response to HIV.

The Directory of trade and investment-related organizations of developing countries and areas in Asia and the Pacific provides information on over 300 trade and investment promotion organizations that are crucial to trade and investment development in the region. Organizations are listed in alphabetical order and by country.

This paper reports on the geographic extension of the Human Development Index from 177 (a several-year plateau in the United Nations Development Programme's HDI) to over 230 economies, including all members and associate members of ESCAP. This increase in geographic coverage makes the HDI more useful for assessing the situations of all economies – including small economies traditionally omitted by UNDP's Human Development Reports.

Poverty and ill-health have a cause-effect relationship in that the poor are often denied access to appropriate health care, thus increasing chances of ill-health. This in turns limits their ability to engage in productive activities. With a large number of people lacking access to basic health care in the Asian and Pacific region, greater efforts are needed to achieve universal coverage.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are often advocated as an effective mechanism for delivering water and sanitation services. At the same time it is argued that in developing countries the private sector lacks the incentives to extend services to the poor and that PPPs may only be able to improve services for the better-off. This paper briefly analyses the difficulties of reaching the poor through PPPs and tries to define a model of PPPs that are specifically designed to serve the poor.

In recent years the Asia-Pacific region, along with the rest of the world, has been assailed by a series of global crises, first the energy and food crises, and more recently the financial and economic crisis – all of which have presented threats to development and to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This report assesses the likely impact. First it tracks progress towards the Goals on the basis of data collected prior to the economic crisis on 21 out of the 60 official MDG indicators. Then it considers how this progress might be hindered by recent events.

This e-book brings together chapters that explore various aspects of trade and financial integration in Asia and the Pacific, the reasons for the lack of it, and potential benefits of strengthening such integration. The book focuses on the exploration of challenges and opportunities that exist in intraregional trade in goods, integration in services trade, availability of trade finance as well as inflows of portfolio investments.

Policymakers in the region are more aware than ever of the economic, social, health and environmental benefits of adequate sanitation. Various efforts have been made to raise the political profile of sanitation, through a United Nations General Assembly resolution (No. 61/192) that declared 2008the International Year of Sanitation, regional high-level sanitation conferences (SACOSAN and EASAN) and close monitoring of the related Millennium Development Goal targets.